United States botanist and algologist. William Randolph Taylor, born 1895 in Philadelphia, gained his PhD in botany in 1920 from the University of Pennsylvania. His initial research dealt with plant cytogenetics and cytotaxonomy, and he published a dozen papers on chromosome morphology and embryogeny in flowering plants, making collecting trips in his home state, New Jersey, and north into Maine and New Brunswick.
During the summers of the early 1920s, he began exploring in the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia, collecting alpine algae, an experience that stimulated a deep interest in phytoplankton, and especially desmids. Then, in the mid-1920s, Taylor was invited by the Carnegie Institution in Washington to conduct a survey of the marine flora of the Dry Tortugas in the Gulf of Mexico, a trip that was to permanently change the course of his research toward the study of benthic marine algae.
In 1957 he became a professor in the Department of Botany at the University of Michigan, where he would spend the rest of his academic life. During his long and productive career, Taylor's research into seaweeds, their taxonomy, cytology, ecology and biogeography established him as a world authority. His expeditions as a marine phycologist took him to the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America and the Galapagos Islands, and in 1946 he made a botanical survey of Bikini and other Marshall Islands in the South Pacific, working as senior biologist in the Navy's 'Operation Crossroads'. He also conducted extensive field work over the years in the western North Atlantic.
A recipient of many honors, including the G. M. Smith Gold Medal in Phycology awarded by the National Academy of Sciences, he was a founding member of the Phycological Society of America and served as vice-president of the Botanical Society of America in 1956, receiving their Merit Award in 1961. His memory is recalled in the generic names Taylorophycus E.Y. Dawson (1961) and Tayloriella H. Kylin (1938). He died with the rank of professor emeritus of Botany in the Department of Botany and curator emeritus of algae in the Herbarium of the University of Michigan in 1990 at age 94.
Sources:
M.J. Wynne, 1991, "William Randolph Taylor (1895-1990)", Taxon, 40(2): 350-351.
